


Dear Mother

by roosterbil



Category: Mortal Kombat (Video Games), Mortal Kombat - All Media Types
Genre: Family Issues, Gen, Johnny Cage is a good friend, Mom OC - Freeform, Mother's Day, Other, Past Abuse (not explicit or focused), Trans Kuai Liang (mentioned but not a focus), all his family kind of sucks and that's ok, and Sub-Zero is a good son, bitter and less sweet, headcanons, his mom's... very American
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 12:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roosterbil/pseuds/roosterbil
Summary: Kuai Liang's long learned lessons on family, separation, and getting your hopes up.





	Dear Mother

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> realized i fucking hated the pacing. made it slower, and did whatever proofreading my brain can do.

“Your mother’s **_alive?_** ”

Hanzo blinked a few times, rapidly, almost to blink away what he just heard or convince himself another party mentioned a mother. They were in a Special Forces base for different purpose, and while the Shirai Ryu lead was convinced he had to know the business pertaining the Lin Kuei, a part of him regretted asking.

It amused Kuai Liang. Out of all the passing details he slipped, from having been snatched by his father as a child or preparing to get on a plane with Johnny Cage, his mother being a breathing figure in Earthrealm was what caught Hanzo’s intrigue. Not even the fact that Sub-Zero was leaving to visit her seemed to cross the resurrected wraith’s mind. But intrigued or not, Hanzo looked readily prepared to move the conversation somewhere else. Eyes wide, lips pressed, gazing elsewhere, like an animal knowing it’s done wrong and scanning for the exits. His own regards to family have not blinded him. She has near never been mentioned, never featured, never seen – and it’s probably for a reason.

“She never left America,” Sub-Zero explained in a flat tone. “Bi-Han saved her contact.”

She wrote, occasionally, before his adolescence. It took ten months for him to understand why Bi-Han snuck a slip of her first letter under a bed mat, and then threw the rest into a firepit. Now it’s been decades, and Kuai Liang colored himself impressed about their covert operation. He never found how the hell she managed to find them (or someone that could) to then deliver anything. Bi-Han kept it under a metaphorical lock and key, never following up with whatever instructions she gave, until  _something_ possessed him to hand the note to Kuai Liang. It was only at their first meeting, Kuai being 19, that she told him she indeed saw Bi-Han a single time. Secrets were made near daily within the Lin Kuei, many more reserved for Bi-Han to then die with, yet they have had a continuous trend of surfacing for his baby brother. Kuai Liang appreciated each one less and less.

Hanzo still looked uncomfortable. His arms crossed, eyes finally settling on a few of his own pupils. A handful of young ninja to-be, lead by the one who died and lived, forever burning. Family is where his heart is. Yet there's nothing visceral, nothing wrenching at his core when he thinks Kuai Liang's brother. “She knows, then?” He couldn’t regret Bi-Han. In the same vein, he’d do the necessary evil of pitying Kuai Liang. 

Kuai Liang shook his head, walking past Hanzo and towards the line of aircrafts in an impulsive twitch. He couldn't handle a look of sympathy, and he resented that he didn't yet know what part of Hanzo's look he could connect to his near future . Past the gates of the Special Forces base, one of the heaps of soaring metal must be waiting. “I’m going to tell her.”

* * *

He had to bring  _someone_ within or affiliated with the Forces. Which was new, and especially unwelcomed. Bringing someone with him was a significant change, and there was no affront more severe to God, his mother's home, and her 56 years on Earth than change. Kuai Liang rejected it immediately, putting off his trip and stalling the jobs of four pilots while engaging in a long, exhausting talk with General Blade about the condition. She stood her ground, with a hint of apology. It was only when Johnny strolled in, volunteering impromptu, that Kuai Liang could find some tolerance in bringing company. 

But Johnny clearly, definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, wanted to retract his offer to come along. He was an awkward sort of polite when he was told where they were headed, lips flat and brows pressed. Kuai Liang did not need to remove the obscuring sunglasses to see a hint of apprehension and possible impending doom in Cage's eyes. Everyone but Johnny could only guess, but it seemed he was resisting his head from exploding, thoughts pouring into his cranium and he was yet feeling the stress. He stayed variably quiet for nearly all the day, playing a game on his phone, occasionally mumbling something to himself or giving an off-hand comment on the weather.

At some point, he took a stress stone from his pocket and was circling it with his thumb. Sub-Zero killed the time competing with himself in a game of marbles. He looked up once to offer Johnny a round, but carried on downward to the assortment of agate pebbles as he saw the celebrity's back turned partway to view the landscape below. The threshold carrying Johnny's willpower caved around halfway through the second air-trip, cued with a loud groan.

“Idaho. _Really?_! Your mom couldn’t be in some big city or even a nice prairie like Jax, _no_. She’s gotta be in Potatoville.” He messed with the therapy stone, a wispy purple with a carved fraudulently-spiritual word Kuai Liang was not committed to reading while Johnny pressed his thumb against it. “Is there anything to like… even do up there?”

“Boise’s not bare, Cage.”

The crease of Johnny’s lips showed just how relieved he was to hear that. “We’re not even going to Boise.”

“You don’t have to stay with me. You're here for the ride, yeah? Perhaps the pilot could take you closer south,” Kuai Liang battled telling Johnny he’d prefer Johnny would do so. He’d love for Johnny to find his own entertainment in Boise, enjoy the subtler urban scape and humble yet energetic venues. Restaurants, probably some classic car show beside an active market of fruit breads, handmade soaps, and tomato starters. Anything but Johnny coming along to Lewiston. Johnny didn't wish to be here, and that made all the difference the way Kuai Liang saw it. But Johnny wasn't responding to that. He just shrugged still using the stone in his hand and a persistent jiggle of his right leg as an anchor to the hole he's continuing to dig for himself.

Sub-Zero had to admit the misfortune. She could be born and raised anywhere, and she just had to be in Lewiston. Not even _in_ the town really, more like a patch of land a bit ways outside of it. The connotation escaped Kuai Liang for the decades that Bi-Han seemed to know too much about it. Now, he could understand the distaste his older brother held to areas similar. Not quite tourist, subtly residential, all an off-putting stench and a history no one but the dead could think uncritically about. The marbles in Kuai Liang's lap were shuttering on the board, which he took as a request to put them back in their small cedar box.

Johnny put the stone he was fiddling with in his pocket, looking down from the helicopter they boarded somewhere closer to the coast. Leave it to Johnny Cage to never shut up, yet convincingly insist he’s staying by Kuai Liang’s side without a word regarding it. “You think any cults are around there?”

“What?”

“You know, people following some surely deluded guy that starts saying he’s a prophet or something. Some small group of hopeful people that get trapped in a forest. Ever heard of not drinking the Kool-Aid?”

The cabin was silent for a minute. No, he never heard of it – but he felt the weight of whatever context held that phrase significance. Who has he trusted, after all these years? How many of them are _dead_? And how many words told to him and others to catalyze these events, were lies? He didn’t know. Maybe he wouldn’t ever know. What led to Bi-Han’s own demise lay a missing piece, but Kuai Liang would insist his innocence. That is not to say a Sub-Zero has ever been guiltless. He just hopes for some decency.

"Cage... I do not doubt it."

Green eyes raise from the forestation to gawk at Kuai Liang for a moment. That was not the answer Johnny wished to hear from a man who jests far too rarely. "That's some shit, Frosty." He didn't ask what Kuai Liang  _knew_ he wanted to ask, so Sub-Zero went out of his way to satisfy the thick air from Johnny's hitched inhale.

"My mother's never done anything like that." To not elaborate felt unconvincing, but that was because he himself was not convinced.

* * *

It was nearing sunset when the aircraft landed. The patch of fine sand and dirt crumbling under their feet was farther than where Sub-Zero last landed, but he didn’t mind and perhaps could thank them later for it. He took a breath, feeling almost as though he could breathe the golden hues of the night’s arrival. The sight before them was layered, mounds of green grass and wildflowers, one before the other until trees began to dot the faraway landscape. They became a collective, ascending to a faraway series of clear peaks.

Johnny was wiping a patch of dirt now staining his designer blue jeans up to their knees. “This is disgusting. And we’re walking?”

“And we’re walking.” Kuai Liang parrots, striding behind Johnny and unzipping the backpack he was carrying to get a canteen. “She… doesn’t appreciate agents knowing where she lives.” He handed the flask to his company before heading to a hill. Johnny took a gulp of water, making a dramatic sigh when he pulled it from his lips.

“See, they wouldn’t even have to know if she lived in some crowded apartment. You could set yourself down there and get a cab. What’s so special about here?”

“It’s a family home.” With a history that does not suit family. “It was an entire ranch, though I’ve only seen sheep nowadays.”

The movie star seemed more miserable with each revealed detail… so Sub-Zero was despaired when he didn’t complain but instead started to get nosy. “Never thought you’d be a farm boy.”

“I never was one.” _I never got to be one._ But really, he wouldn't paint it paradise. No place is paradise, and living comes with all sorts of prices no matter your predestined conditions or choices onward. The revelation that hurt most so far was that living here would have done possibly nothing for him. Maybe, it'd do worse for he and Bi-Han. It was strict as it flowed slowly in time, nothing like the precision of the Lin Kuei... it punished its own laziness frequently. Perhaps he'd only know in an alternate timeline, where his mother pulled them away to hide from their father here - but his optimism for that sort of life ran short. It c _ould_ bring a cult around, Kuai Liang determined. Past that, he decided to not look into difference that had in contrast to delirious families or honor-bound clanhood.

A few more miles and a few less foothills, and Kuai Liang paused at the peak of what’d be the small ledge overseeing a series of worn fences, united by several livestock stalls. At some point in their hike, they switched the backpack, if only to feel compassionate towards each other’s shared travel and for Johnny to not feel a relativity to a pack-mule. The walk wasn’t bad at all; it lacked the stress of a climb or the pace of marathon… Johnny, with all his griping, didn’t seem strained enough to find the relief in seeing a hint of civilization.

They didn’t say a word, though they didn’t quite know why.

Kuai Liang looked to his feet, carefully treading the small fall off the ledge and heading to the house sitting beside the gated pastures. A humbled and elderly home with foundation evening its position on a slight downward slope, white panels littered with cobwebs, interrupted by windows framed navy blue. The view of the inside was obscured by mesh and white shutters. There was no driveway or port to park anything, instead the red pick-up and the dilapidated silver sedan were parked side by side on a patch of drying grass, vaguely parallel to the side of the home. He wondered if the stacked tires and scattered tools meant she was doing anything about either vehicle, seeing as the smaller was what she'd call ' _total'd to hell_.' He'd give her the credit of keeping productive in spite of her age. She liked things worn, but not desolate - herself included.

An automated lantern flickered on, and as Sub-Zero stepped on the porch he heard a scuttle of a glass bowl beside his boot. It was cat food. Fresh but drying tuna, pungent but not retch-worthy. Johnny seemed to light up the slightest, perhaps to know that if anything were to bore or exonerate him, he had an animal to bother. There was no graver warning that the home had no cable or internet than witnessing it, and standing on its isolated lot of land. Kuai Liang's hand hovered the doorbell, his fingers gracing the button with greater care than he'd give a blade.

With Johnny hovering, Kuai Liang hated to hesitate. Implying he was anything short of glad to visit his own mother seemed to make his escort antsy – but it was never easy to stop by. The news to deliver didn't make ringing that doorbell that much easier, but eventually he had to give up the dance and _ring the damn thing_.

The two stilted tones of the ring were followed by dead silence. Long before Johnny could knock on the door with his raised fist, barely before Kuai Liang could reach to grab Johnny's wrist, the door swung open and they were greeted with the barrel end of a pistol.


End file.
